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developerWorks: Developing cfperl, From the Beginning

"To quote Frank Herbert, 'the beginning is a delicate time.'
This chapter is the beginning of a discussion of the cfperl
project. The cfperl project brings together many of the topics
covered in the developerWorks Linux zone articles: Perl, cfengine,
parsing of text, and writing good clean code.

"The cfperl project began for me when I realized that cfengine,
a wonderful system administration tool, could benefit from features
present in Perl but difficult to implement as cfengine modules or C
extensions. For instance, cfengine's file editing abilities were
decidedly awkward compared to the more natural (to me) Perl
constructs.

"In essence, cfperl was an itch I needed to scratch. I conceived
it as a tool that could augment cfengine, not as a tool that could
replace it. The next few chapters will cover the ideas and planning
I put into the cfperl project. It is a project I did (and still am
doing) for fun; it is not finished by far. What I hope to teach is
the approach I took to cfperl, and how it might apply to your own
projects..."